[From Litha to Lammas]: Flammifer, gen, 5/7, Realm of Song series

[lomonaaeren]

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Days of Mortal Lands

Harry opens his eyes in a dream, and pauses. He knows this isn’t supposed to happen. Blackeye told him when she removed the soul-piece from his scar that Voldemort might have been able to send him nightmares if they hadn’t taken it out, but Harry hasn’t had any since then.

On the other hand, it seems a bit like the dream that he had when the diary Horcrux was under his pillow. Harry draws his daggers and turns around.

He’s in the middle of some kind of immense ice cave, the walls glittering with silver and blue and purple colors. Harry studies them, then says, “I have to admit, there are nicer caves than this in the Realm of Song.”

Someone laughs gently, and a human woman steps around one of the icicles that point down at the floor of the cave. Harry doesn’t know her. Her skin is pale like the ice, and her eyes have its green color. “Don’t you recognize me, Harry?” she murmurs.

“No.”

That makes her pause for a moment, but only a moment. In the next one, she’s shaking her head and stepping forwards again. “But you should. I’m your mother.”

“No, you’re not,” Harry says, frowning as Stargazer buzzes angrily in his hand. “She had a bright soul, and I’ve met her. And your hair’s white.” That seems like an odd detail to forget and an easy one to repair, and it makes his doubt grow. If he only gets dreams when something like the diary Horcrux is near, and—

And this is a woman—

Harry comes hurtling out of the dream, and out of his bed, with a shout. He sees something lunge whisper-quick across the bed and nearly catch him. But he’s sprung up on the headboard of his bed now, and the bedpost, which likes him, falls across the length of the sheets to crush Nagini.

She whips aside, hissing about death and blood. Listening to her language, Harry feels his stomach tighten with grief. She’s as insane as the basilisk, and although he still doesn’t have the Fiendfyre ready to kill her, he thinks, it will be a mercy when he does. Then at least she’ll be away from Voldemort’s equally insane clutches.

Right now, she rears back, says something about her master, and snaps at him. Harry again lunges aside, and decides that while the basilisk-fang dagger can’t kill her, it can at least make her a little less dangerous.

He strikes downwards, rolling out of the way of another lunge, and she utters a human-sounding scream. So do at least two of the boys in his dorm.

Nagini slithers around, and Harry cuts across her tail to make sure that she can’t attack them. But even if she does, she’ll have to hug them to death. Harry’s strike across her mouth broke both her fangs, which now are lying on the floor next to the bed, smoking and staining the rug there. Harry winces away from the rug’s screams. He’s not having a good track record with floors lately.

Nagini is hissing with pain, but she doesn’t slow down. Harry doesn’t even know if she’s sane enough to slow down. She flows towards the bed where Michael is struggling with his covers, and Harry springs after her with a shout.

Nagini doesn’t turn around, as if she knows that killing an innocent will hurt Harry worse than anything else she could do. But she lunges with her mouth in what might be instinct, and Michael flinches as the fangless mouth crashes into his arm but doesn’t scream in pain. Nagini lashes her tail, pulls away from him, and launches herself at Harry again.

Harry grins fiercely. This is more like it, a dangerous opponent fighting the trained warrior in the room.

He meets her in midair and goes down under her bulk, which she promptly tries to wrap around him, hissing in fury about how he made her less dangerous. Harry asks the flagstones under the rugs for help as he arches and twists so that Nagini can’t strangle him on the spot.

The stones ripple and then wrap them both up, in an imitation of the snake’s movement. Nagini, trapped on top of Harry, strikes at him again and again, still hissing. Harry grimaces as he feels one of his ribs break from her hug. The floor did its best, but misunderstood a little of what he wanted. It probably thought he wanted to be bound close to Nagini so he could kill her himself.

Harry slaps his hand down on a flagstone not covered by the rug and clarifies his request. The stone surges, and this time, the bindings fall away. Nagini tries to wrap her tail around Harry and continue crushing him, but the next instant, she goes flying backwards, hauled by the coils of stone creating themselves out of the floor.

Harry staggers to his feet, panting. The broken rib is a problem, but it won’t limit his movement as much as having Nagini strangling him did. Harry decides to see how immune a Horcrux is to having her head cut off, and lunges with both his daggers at once.

Nagini flinches back, and Harry misses. He turns, rebounding off the side of his bed, and comes in at another angle.

His daggers land this time, but only manage to inflict a couple of deep puncture wounds before Nagini tears herself away. Harry runs after her, panting, ignoring the jabs of pain from his broken rib. He is going to make sure that she can’t kill someone else, which he’s sure she’d try even if she’s leaving the castle.

He finds that the stairs down to the common room have become a crude slide, which Nagini takes in one rippling motion. Harry narrows his eyes and takes the banister down the way he did on the night the werewolves attacked, asking the stairs what the hell they think they’re doing.

They don’t get a chance to answer before Nagini reaches the door of the Ravenclaw common room and smashes her way through it. Harry goes after her and finds her turning to something less solid than smoke, vanishing along the side of the wall.

Harry hurls Stargazer, which is humming urgently in his hand. It pierces through the snake-smoke-thing and elicits one more hiss of pain, but then Nagini is gone. Harry has to go and pick up Stargazer, which is stuck in a crack in the floor and humming. His hand is clenched hard on the dagger’s hilt, his panting taking over his whole body.

Footsteps on the stairs make him turn around with his daggers in hand, but it’s only Professor Flitwick. He pulls up and stares at Harry with wide eyes, turning his head to take in the wall, the smashed door to the common room, and Harry’s wounds.

“Are you all right, Harry?” he asks in Gobbledegook.

His people’s language soothes Harry, and makes him remember that he has allies. He nods shortly. “Yes, professor. But Voldemort’s snake was here. I don’t know how she got into the dorms, but the stairs up to our bedroom turned into a ramp for her.”

Professor Flitwick’s eyes narrow. “That is indeed disturbing. All the parts of the castle should unite in protecting students from such horror, not enabling them.”

“Don’t worry,” Harry says grimly, fastening both daggers to his belt again. “I’m going to ask the stairs what they were thinking, and tell them not to do it if she comes back.”

*

Professor Flitwick finds Harry later, when the other Ravenclaw students have been reassured, Nagini’s fangs taken to Dumbledore’s office, Harry’s rib healed by Madam Pomfrey, and the stairs transformed back to their ordinary shape. Harry is sitting on the bottom of the staircase that leads up to the common room door, and he has his head in his hands.

Professor Flitwick lightly touches his shoulder, then sits down beside him without a word.

“I asked the stairs,” Harry says in a dull voice. He can feel the pain pounding from him, and by the silence that Professor Flitwick preserves for long moments, he can sense it.

“Why did they transform for her?” he whispers at last.

Harry lifts his head and looks at his professor, not trying to hide his tears. There aren’t any humans around to misjudge them, and the stairs beneath Harry are simply anxious, trying to reassure him that they didn’t change to a ramp. Nagini managed to disappear the way she did because of snake magic connected to pipes in the walls that Salazar Slytherin left behind.

“She asked them to,” Harry whispers. “She learned how to talk to objects. Professor, someone taught her.”

Professor Flitwick closes his eyes. He knows as well as Harry that no true goblin would have worked with Voldemort’s snake or Horcrux, not after the cup Horcrux corrupted Graveltooth and not after Harry’s clan has declared him included in their war. “Do you think it could be a case of corruption, again? That Nagini spent so much time around a goblin that she corrupted them the way the cup corrupted its vault-keeper?”

“I hope so,” Harry whispers. “But goblins are just as prone to corruption as anyone. Graveltooth—her corruption was sad, but she also had the chance to come and tell us what was happening early on in the process, when the cup didn’t have complete control of her. That’s what Ripclaw said. And it didn’t happen.”

“And now…”

“Now, I’m afraid of who Nagini corrupted,” Harry says simply. “And how she did it, when the bank itself would have rejected her on sight. I know she can move around the school because of…” He gestures at the wall, the pipes that are the legacy of Salazar Slytherin and allowed Nagini to turn to smoke, and Professor Flitwick nods. “But there shouldn’t be any entrances like that to the Realm of Song.”

“I will help you,” Professor Flitwick whispers. “I’ll help you any way I can, examining this, or investigating this, or—if wizard magic and dueling will help you, you only have to ask.”

Harry leans for a second against his Head of House’s shoulder, nodding. He feels almost the way he did when it finally came to him that Crouch would never duel him, that his cowardice was so blinding, and that other humans could be like that.

Goblins can be corrupted, too. They can get greedy and go after rare treasures that their own exertions can’t grant them, or be overconfident in their battle prowess. Maybe someone thought they could battle Nagini and they knew best, and just…

Went over the brink.

Goblins are mortal, too.

Burning Waste

“And so you’ve confirmed the basilisk-fang dagger does nothing to Nagini.” Dumbledore sighs a little. “Well, it would have been nice if it had. How close are you to assuming control of Fiendfyre, Harry?”

“Very close,” Harry admits. He’s shifting back and forth in the chair, and tries to calm down, because at this point the chair is going to be complaining almost as much as the Headmaster’s desk. “At the moment, I can cast it and I can make it end. The problem is controlling it in the moments between the beginning and the end of the spell.”

Dumbledore blinks, then chuckles. “Yes, I imagine that would be a problem,” he says. “Do you think that you might show me?”

“I’m reluctant to cast in here, sir,” Harry says doubtfully, staring around. “I mean, your desk complains a lot, but I don’t think that I should burn it.”

“I didn’t mean in here, precisely. I was thinking of a space like the Room of Requirement.”

Harry smiles. “That’s where I go to practice, sir. I’ll lead the way.”

If Dumbledore knows how much trust Harry has in him, to turn his back to a former enemy, the Headmaster doesn’t show it. He only beams and nods. “Please do, Harry.”

*

“Please show me what kind of Fiendfyre you can cast so far, Harry.”

Harry nods and stands still for a few moments with his eyes closed. He has to reach for Fiendfyre in a way that he doesn’t with most of his other spells. The objects or spell effects they conjure want to come into existence, long tamed by the incantation and the wand or dagger movements. Fiendfyre seems to ask why Harry wants to waste its time, and demand something more than just need.

Harry is just as glad of that, really. He doesn’t ever want to become accustomed to casting Fiendfyre. He has to master it, he knows that, but the feeling of mastery over something that blazes so close to the living just upsets him.

Finally he can feel the tingling in his fingertips that signals the Fiendfyre is ready, and he draws his wand and speaks the incantation.

The fire writhes out of his wand, and quickly begins to grow in the center of the room. Harry watches as it changes shape first into a ruddy lion with long claws, and then a golden leopard with orange spots instead of black ones. Then it turns and sees him, and the fire tenses and crouches down to the floor.

“I don’t think you want to do that,” Harry advises it with a tired smile.

The Fiendfyre doesn’t listen to him, the same way it hasn’t listened to him in the past, and springs straight at him. Harry scoots off to the side, and the leopard comes down in the middle of the floor with nothing to burn except the stone. Unfortunately, it does that, pretty well, and then it spins around and stalks towards Harry again.

Harry sighs and casts the countercurse. The leopard has time for a surprised expression before it dissolves into sparks and disappears into his wand.

“Does that happen every time, my boy?” Dumbledore is stroking his beard, looking back and forth between the burned place on the floor (another floor Harry has done something to) and Harry.

“Yeah.” Harry leans back on his elbow against the wall and sighs again. “It comes out and it goes away, but I can’t keep it from turning on me.”

“Of course, that is a common problem for casters of Fiendfyre.” Dumbledore is speaking slowly, his eyebrows furrowed, as if he’s trying to see through the common problem to the root of Harry’s. “But usually the casters can manage to make it choose at least a few shapes and move in a few directions. Did you choose to the lion or the leopard shape?”

Harry shakes his head. Dumbledore nods in response. “Then I think the major problem, Harry, is that you do not seek to master it. And you must.”

“I don’t want to enslave it.”

“Yes, but there is a difference between mastery and enslavement, Harry. Do you think of yourself as enslaving letters when you write an essay?”

Harry pauses and thinks. “Well, no, because they wouldn’t exist without the ink and the quill and my intent to write them.”

“Exactly.” Dumbledore looks delighted, and Harry wonders if he would have been better off staying a professor at Hogwarts, the way he used to be. “The Fiendfyre wouldn’t exist without you, either. And just as you might cage a dangerous beast so it could be taken to a place better-suited for it and released, you can cage the Fiendfyre long enough for it to do its task, and then banish it back to where it can roam free.”

Harry relaxes. That’s a much better way of thinking about the spell than as a raging wild creature he would have to conquer, the way he’s been doing. “Thanks, Professor.”

“Of course, my dear boy.” Dumbledore studies the place where the Fiendfyre was crouched in leopard form again and clucks his tongue. “Clever of Tom to make his snake immune to anything except this one spell. But he might not even have known of that weakness.”

Harry smiles. “Oblivious enemies are the best kind to have.”

Far Astray

“Harry, could you come to my office, please? The Minister wants to speak to you.”

Harry’s just finished a Goblin Dueling class session, so he doesn’t mind that much, but he makes sure to glance back and catch Luna’s eyes and then Ginny’s. Ginny grips her daggers. Harry makes a swift flick of his fingers, telling her not to follow right now, but also to come up in an hour if he hasn’t come down. Luna trots along merrily behind him.

Dumbledore opens his mouth when he sees her. Harry looks serenely at him, and Dumbledore shakes his head a little but doesn’t say anything as they walk up the staircases to the room where Harry feels like he’s spent a lot of time lately.

Harry frowns at the desk when he steps into the room, because it’s groaning so loudly that the humans’ ignorance of objects must be the only reason they’re not hearing it. Harry asks if it’s tired of working as a desk, and if he should chop it up or burn it.

The desk reacts with horror, and also says that it doesn’t want to leave the office. Harry frowns harder. There goes his latest desk-liberation plan.

“Mr. Potter.”

Fudge speaks in a guttural voice. Harry turns to him. “Sorry, were you feeling ignored? It was just talking to the desk.” He sees Dumbledore give his desk a covert look, and hopes that maybe the Headmaster can persuade the desk to leave. It should really stop staying in a relationship that hurts it.

“Yes, I was feeling ignored.” Fudge adjusts his tie around his neck. “I insist that you remove this curse, Mr. Potter.”

“No, thanks.”

Fudge stares at him blankly, and then shakes his head and says, “I don’t think you understand. You need to remove this curse so that I can eat, and buy new clothes and shelter. Or is it the policy of the goblins to starve their enemies to death, now?” He looks almost delighted, probably because he’s thinking how good that would sound to other humans if he can get it into the Daily Prophet.

Harry frowns. “I didn’t realize you didn’t know. That part of the curse will end the instant you step down from the Minister’s office. You can get all the Galleons you want doing something else.”

Some of his clan did suggest extending the curse so that Fudge would never be able to hold money or bribes in a new job, either, but Harry thought that was cruel. It’s none of his clan’s concern what happens to Fudge when he isn’t a problem for them anymore.

“I do not want to stop being Minister!”

“Then the curse won’t end.”

“You can’t do this to me! I am the Minister for Magic!”

“But he did do it to you,” Luna points out. “Or rather, the goblins did.” She turns to Harry. “Why do you think people say things like that? Are they really expecting a different result?”

“I don’t know, Luna. It’s always puzzled me, too.” Harry turns back to Fudge to ask, but the Minister draws his wand. Harry immediately steps in front of Luna. She’s suffered enough at the wands of humans.

“You ought to stay out of things that don’t concern you,” Fudge says, and Harry doesn’t think his new emphasis on a bunch of different words makes him more effective. Then again, Fudge probably doesn’t want to hear that. “I am the Minister for Magic, and I will do as I damn well please!”

“Except when it comes to accepting bribes and putting Galleons in your vault and lying,” Harry says helpfully.

“You will shut up!”

“No, not really.”

Fudge casts some fiery golden spell Harry doesn’t recognize. Harry ducks and pulls down Luna with him. He hears Dumbledore thunder “Cornelius!”, and decides if Dumbledore and Fudge want to duel each other, Harry will leave them to it. He probably shouldn’t claim the duel when there are members of his clan who would have more right to it, anyway.

But when he stands up, Fudge is ignoring Dumbledore and swinging around like a compass to still point his wand right at Harry and Luna. Harry narrows his eyes. “I don’t like people who point a wand at my friends,” he says.

Fudge ignores him, and fires a Body-Bind.

Harry blocks with his daggers, and starts to speak again. But this time, Fudge casts a Forbidding Charm that would keep Harry from doing certain things. It’s a charm that Dumbledore once tried to cast on him, and which doesn’t work on a goblin. Harry braces himself and grips his daggers without thought.

The spell washes over him—

And over Luna.

I forgot to shield her! Harry thinks, a horrible feeling touching him. That’s the worst defect a warrior can possibly have.

Fudge speaks first, as Harry is reeling in the miasma of his guilt and self-doubt. “You will not speak against me again. You will not act against me. You will remove these curses.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Luna says musingly.

Harry turns to her, relief bursting through him. She would be a lot more obedient if the Forbidding Charm had affected her, but he doesn’t know why it didn’t. “Are you all right?”

“Of course.” Luna glances back and forth between Fudge and Harry. “Do you think I should be doing something else instead? I promise that I’ll consider it.”

Harry laughs in spite of himself, while Fudge looks furious. “No, no, it’s all right. I just thought the Forbidding Charm would have affected you because it affects humans.”

“I wasn’t thinking of myself as human today,” Luna says, and a faint blush touches her cheeks. “I was trying to think myself into the mind of a Crumple-Horned Snorkack. Father swears he almost found one before the Death Eaters captured him.”

Harry smiles at her and turns back to Fudge. The Minister is opening his mouth to shout something at Luna, probably, but he goes quiet and steps back a little at whatever he sees in Harry’s face.

“If you ever use a spell on one of my friends again,” Harry says, “then your Galleons rolling away from your fingers is going to look pretty pleasant, compared to what I’ll do to you.”

In the silence that follows, Fawkes utters a trilling croon so ridiculous that Harry laughs. Fudge looks angry, but still cowed, which means that he won’t speak. Harry turns to Dumbledore. “I knew this fool was waiting up here, sir, but I’m not sure what he came to the school for.”

Dumbledore delicately clears his throat. “Ah, yes. As it is, my dear boy, Cornelius came so that he could tell you in person that the Goblin Dueling and Creature Culture classes will indeed last past the end of this term.”

Fudge glares at him and turns and marches to the Floo. Harry watches him go with a shrug. As long as the Minister is taken care of, then Harry doesn’t much care what he does. And if he won’t step out of the Ministerial office of his own free will, then the curses will just go on affecting him until he does.

Harry sees no point in continuing to kick an enemy while he’s on the floor.

*

Harry wakes up in a dream that at first makes him think a Horcrux is near, but he did speak to Hogwarts about the pipes that allowed Nagini to move around freely. The school was sort of mortified, or at least as much as a thousand-year-old building gets, and promised to seal them up. So he doesn’t think she’s near right now.

Besides, the dream is a little different. The ground is crowded with swirling mist, and not as solid as the cavern of ice where he met Nagini. Harry still sets his feet and grips his daggers, because he isn’t a fool.

The mist parts, and Voldemort strides towards him, red eyes brilliant with fury.

Harry grins at him. “Hi.” He stabs with his basilisk-fang dagger, because he doesn’t know that won’t work in a dream, and Voldemort takes a step away. Harry sighs as his blade passes through the mist without affecting it. They probably don’t work here, then.

“What do you want?” Harry asks, sitting back and staring at Voldemort again.

“I can use the connection that once existed between us to invade your mind,” Voldemort whispers. His voice seems to bounce from various hidden stone walls.

“And you only just now found this out? After being back in a body for almost two years?” Harry shakes his head. He stares for a second at the wand arm that’s projecting from Voldemort’s shoulder. “I see that you boiled more unicorns alive to get your arm back. Or is that just the way you want to look in this dream?” He grins when Voldemort bares his teeth. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want to look solid to terrify me. It’s sweet, but you don’t have to.”

“You were one of my Horcruxes.”

“Yeah, but Blackeye took care of that shard of your soul a long time ago.”

“You belonged to me.”

“Past tense.”

Voldemort clenches both his fists. Harry feels a certain joy in knowing that he’ll only be doing that here in the dream, not anywhere outside it. “How does it feel to know that you bore a shard of your parents’ murderer’s soul inside you?”

“It makes me pity you.”

Voldemort seems to stop breathing. Another unreality courtesy of the dream, Harry’s sure, but he’s happy to smile and say, “Do you need any help stopping your lungs permanently? I could try it.”

“Explain to me why you pity me.” Voldemort is trying to murder the English words that escape his mouth. Harry is a little glad that words don’t have consciousness like other objects do. “Do it now.”

“Bossy,” Harry says, and grins when Voldemort’s face begins to flush. “I pity you because you didn’t even intend to make me a Horcrux. I could understand if you’d done it on purpose, even though it’s kind of gross. But not when it happened because your soul was so unstable that one piece just…dripped off.”

“Dripped off?”

“Detached. Fell off. Slumped off.”

Voldemort utters a soft, a very soft, snarl. Harry nods. “Are we going to duel?” he asks hopefully. It would make this boring dream a little less boring.

“Perhaps you ought to ask yourself why I am able to access your dream, if you have purged my influence so wholly from your mind,” Voldemort spits.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Harry says, a little pained that Voldemort doesn’t know this. “It’s like the wrapper left behind when you open a sweet. The thing that once contained the Horcrux is still there. It’s just not the Horcrux anymore. And once I write to Blackeye and ask her for a way to get rid of an immaterial sweet wrapper, then the hole will be gone.”

Voldemort screams in frustration and vanishes. Harry is glad when the strange dream melts back into a more ordinary one, this one about orange lights playing on the dragon-headed door. Voldemort really does make Harry writhe with secondhand embarrassment sometimes.